By Khushboo Balwani February 6, 2018 on Shareable Here’s the problem: The rapid expansion of cities is breaking the relationship that people have with the food ecosystem. Although the problem is receiving attention by some city officials, and they are adopting new sustainability programs and policies, it is a time-consuming, top-down process with an uncertain impact. What if with a bottom-up approach of …

A smart city is really about the application of data, the acquisition of data and how do we apply the data analytics to make better decisions. For me and the way I look at how we gauge smart cities, it’s about making better decisions with better data. In many cases, automating decisions that can be automated frees us up to …

Jan 18 2018 The La Tuna fire of September 2017 was the biggest Los Angeles had seen for 50 years Pic: By Scott L from Los Angeles, United States of America – 1_E1C9469, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link) By Megan Darby Four Los Angeles city council members are calling for emergency funds to set up a department for climate action. Citing recent devastating wildfires in California, linked to global …

Sat 27 Jan 2018 The Guardian London’s cycle superhighway squeezes cars on Victoria Embankment. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Imagine a healthy future. That we need to change radically was shown by a mass study of the health of 300,000 people that was at once entirely shocking and wholly predictable. Newcastle University found obesity and the lack of exercise (the two go …

Portland, Ore., climate activists celebrate a win against Big Oil as city- and state-level initiatives gain momentum across the country. Kevon Paynter posted Feb 05, 2018, in Yes! Magazine On a clear July morning three years ago, dozens of environmental activists pushed their kayaks into the Willamette River in Portland while others rappelled 400 feet from the top of St. Johns …

By Joe Cortright, 6 Feb 2018, CityLab.com Localism can only flourish with a competent, generous, and fair federal government. In the past year, a growing chorus of voices, disillusioned by growing polarization, has called for cities to be our saviors. Take Richard Florida’s description of the latest of these “The New Localism.” “In a time of national dysfunction and, frankly, …

Excerpt from Inside Climate News Since the dawn of the environmental movement, polluters have faced resistance from local residents and environmental advocates. But as industry encroached deeper into the natural world, a new legal movement emerged to end the centuries-old American legal tradition that defined nature as property. Most community activism has focused on trying to influence environmental agency decision-making, and …

New Yorker, 12 Feb 2018 Big events go by unseen while we sweat the smaller stuff; things happen underground while we watch the boulevard parades. Truly underground, sometimes: in 1858, the pundits and politicians in Britain were obsessing over the British government’s takeover of India from the East India Company and the intentions of Napoleon III, yet the really big …

CURBED DEMANDS: The humble curb is fast becoming the city’s hottest asset, by Karen Hao, 26 Jan 2018, Quartz Curbed Could this be the key to solving urban congestion? (Rikki Chan/Unsplash) SHARE WRITTEN BY Karen Hao January 26, 2018 In the city of the future, the ability to get people from point A to point B will be as much about …